As the building’s skeleton has emerged up and out (and out and out) of the basement, the project site literally looks different every day. For a beautiful illustration of that fact, check out this time lapse video of construction; it covers the period from April 2010 to the beginning of Feb. 2011 at 10 hours per second:

If you’re impatient, forward to about 3:25 – that’s when the magic starts happening.
Can’t see the video? Click here.

Here are just a few of the big things the construction team has accomplished since November:

The concrete structure for the basement, level one, level two, and level three is in place and curing (getting up to strength.) Once the formwork is removed, temporary wooden shoring columns remain in place as the subsequent floor slabs are poured. This allows the contractor to keep building the structure even as the concrete below does its final bit of drying out.

The scaffolding and formwork for the slab on level 4 are being installed, and the columns that will support the wing’s highest floor are being formed and poured as well. To prepare for a slab pour, the contractor installs a system of scaffolding, plywood, steel and aluminum beams and supports, and metal pans to serve as a giant jello mold for the concrete to fill. Woven in between the pans and the plywood are the steel rebar and cables that reinforce the slab’s concrete and also allow the slab to get “tied in” to the columns above and below it.

Post-tensioned steel cables within the concrete structure are beginning to be stressed on the third level. Post-tensioned steel cables are a way of reinforcing the structure. They serve the same purpose that rebar does, but what happens is that they pour the concrete over the cables, then after the concrete has dried for a few days, the contractor pulls on the cables from both ends with hydraulic jacks. (This is called stressing.) The tightening of the cables is part of strengthening the slab. Using post-tensioning is one way to get longer spans of concrete between columns without having to make the floor slab thicker, meaning the diplodocus will have plenty of room to stretch his neck in the new Paleontology Hall.

The new loading dock, which extended the existing dock, was poured at the end of December. While museum visitors rarely see it, the loading dock is one of HMNS’s critical areas of operations. The artifacts and construction materials for every exhibit flow through the dock. The delightful creepy crawly animals that the Education department takes to visit schools depart from the dock. And the tables and chairs and scrumptious food for special events arrive at (and are sometimes even prepared at) the dock. Not only does the new dock provide more space for these important functions, but it also includes a new powered lift to allow for more flexibility when heavy crates with fossils or mummies arrive. Kudos to the contractor for doing this work with minimal disruption to museum operations!

The new natural gas emergency backup generator was delivered and set in place. It’s not the sexiest piece of equipment on the job, but when you need it, you’re glad it’s there… especially if you’re a fish or a butterfly.

All that in just three months? You betcha. And the fun has only just begun!

PS. We’ve added 25 new images of the site to our HMNS Expansion Flickr set – including the first photos from inside the new building!

Authored By Susanna Kartye

Susanna joined the HMNS Expansion project team in October 2009 as the museum’s representative during construction of the new wing, which is scheduled for completion in 2012. When she’s not laughing her head off at the comic stylings of the HMNS Building department (while trying to get some work done) Susanna is also principal of The Sarrazin Group, a real estate investment and management company, and is pursuing her MBA through the weekend program at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Follow the progress of the HMNS Expansion project through her monthly updates, which she hopes will make her as big an internet star as Zac.

The AMNH hall has a wider diversity of fossils, and is larger – but our new hall is being developed from the ground up, and as the museum’s president said in the article, “We’re not renovating a historic space on the classic idea of displaying skeletons in a row. We’re building a new structure. It will have 21st century interactivity.”

So, while the AMNH has a larger fossil collection – the way in which the fossils will be presented in the new HMNS hall will be much more dynamic, interactive and modern. I hope that helps! Thanks for your comment.

Equally Interesting Posts

Lecture – The Religious Question: Texas Colonization, Mexico and Church, 1770-1836 by Brian Stauffer Religious dynamics played a part in shaping the fortunes of Texas starting in her days as the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. Mexico’s rupture with Spain in 1821 raised new questions about the place of the powerful Catholic Church in […]

This week the community that we are so proud to be a part of has suffered a devastating loss. In the midst of that suffering, many of you reached out to see how the museum was faring and if the collections were safe. We could not be more humbled, grateful and […]

The controversy about whether famous dinosaurs had feathers has been raging for a while now. We’ve known that some dinosaurs had feathers ever since Archaeopteryx was discovered in 1861, but more recent discoveries of the presence of feather-like structures on larger dinosaurs ( like Lane the Triceratops here at HMNS) that are more distantly related to […]

With camps starting this week (click here for our camp schedule) there is a whirlwind of activity in the education department as everyone gets ready for another exciting summer. Some of the Education staff started their careers at HMNS as campers in Xplorations Summer Camps; some of us started as part-time camp teachers in the […]

My office here at the Houston Museum of Natural Science is basically right outside a public hallway, so I overhear a great variety of things, from surprised exclamations as patrons look up and see the giant stuffed grizzly bear down the hall to hums of confusion as they examine a map (the Hall of […]

The Houston Museum of Natural Science will be serving as mission control on Saturday, March 4th for an out-of-this-world Gala: The Big Bang Ball. Make a big impact by bidding in our first-ever online Gala Auction! Explore our unique auction items, including dino-mite fossils, dazzling gemstones as well as once in a lifetime museum experiences […]